Welcome to the Straight Hype, new home of the former
internet hot spot "The Rant". The Straight Hype's egregious spelling and atrocious grammar are kept in check by my associate editor, the lovely Miss Claire, and the site looks so pretty thanks to our in-house computer guru, the esteemed Mr. Paul Leger. Please feel free to email any comments to the editor, Joe Leger (that's me), at joe_leger@hotmail.com. Mr. Leger is a writer living in Atlantic Canada.

Thursday, November 27, 2008

I hear there's a new search engine out there whose environmentalist creators have pledged to plant a tree for every 100 search inquiries entered per person utilizing the service. Great if your into that kind of rubbish, but I would be more inclined to use a search engine that pledges to clear-cut an acre of the rain forest for every fifty searches entered. It's kind of like those great Sumatra coffee beans they grow in soil that has a high content of volcanic ash - some anti globalist do-gooders won't buy the coffee beans because it's picked by 6 year old children under less than perfect conditions; I say it's their tiny hands that make it tasty.

Anyway, on to the subject du jour.

How do they contain themselves? "They" being the Sunday morning pundits who are helping the progressives try and hammer a brittle nail into conservatism's coffin. The truth is that conservatism didn't die on the November 4th, and President-elect Obama's fortunes are not - as we discussed in the last post - a result of the rise of the so-called "moderate" cabal of the American populace. It's a cheap slight of hand parlour trick the media is so good at - creating an issue that didn't exist to begin with and making you think it was there all along. On November 5th, the big question on every news anchor's lips was "What does the Republican party have to do to reach out to moderate voters?" Did you catch that? You might have missed it if you blinked. My question is simple - who decided that the Republican party needs to change their strategy to reach out to moderate voters, or if these so called "moderates" (i.e. liberals) even require reaching out to in the first place? Was there a debate before the debate that even clarified what a "moderate" voter is?

Initiatives to ban gay marriage were on the ballot in 30 states, and these initiatives passed in every one of them. If, as my friend Jonah Goldberg pointed out, white liberals see gay marriage legislation as the single most important civil rights issue of their generation, then it seems that progressive Democrats are in a lot more trouble than the conservative base of the Republican party. The ban on gay marriage even passed in California, which is the Mecca of all things ridiculously liberal.

This is not a trivial matter and conservatives should take heart that the core convictions of Hispanic, African American, and blue collar voters remain steadfastly socially conservative.

I must admit that it would be intellectually dishonest of me to say that many in the conservative movement do not share this opinion - it was even the central theme of the recent Republican Governor's conference. Many prominent Conservatives such as Ross Douthat and Chris Buckley feel that Conservatives should concede that the great welfare state is here to stay, and the movement should work within these parameters to try and shape public policy to reward those -such as in the case of welfare - who are trying to return to work and be less gracious toward those who are using the social safety net as a hammock. Even Rush Limbaugh conceded this almost two decades ago in The Way Things Ought To Be. I say this is conceding defeat, when the opposing army is oblivious to the weakness of their position.

Conservatives, as Goldberg said, should strive to be happy warriors, throwing everything in the conservative arsenal at the Democratic party, and continue not only to be anti-left, but also anti-state.

In the winter of 1777, as Washington's Continental army froze at Valley Forge, soldiers starving and barefooted in the snow, it would have been easy to concede that the end was near. It wasn't until Washington realized that the reason his army was starving in the breadbasket of the nation was because farmers were selling their Summer harvest to the British army stationed in Philadelphia, who payed for food in Sterling pounds, instead of selling their goods to the Army, who were paying the farmers in worthless Continental currency.

Conservatives and the Republican party may be at their own Valley Forge at the moment. We all need to see through the snow and press on undaunted for the glory of the cause.

Wednesday, November 12, 2008

Wow! It's been a busy week. My last post tore the lid off my inbox with new fans of the site, and a couple of Euro-dweebs that are perplexed that some blogger up in the cold white north isn't so enthusiastic about President-elect Obama's re-heated Swedish style socialism, the type of government that Alexis De Tocqueville once said endeavours to;

"keep them in perpetual childhood. . . . For their happiness such a government willingly labors, but it chooses to be the sole agent and the only arbiter of that happiness; it provides for their security, foresees and supplies their necessities, facilitates their pleasures, manages their principal concerns, directs their industry, regulates the descent of poverty and subdivides their inheritances: what remains, but to spare them all the care of thinking and all the trouble of living?"

As the voting tallies begin to be broken down, dissected and disseminated by beltway bean counters with giant computer-ma-jiggies, some curious data is rising to the surface confirming my previous assertion that many "new voter" demographic groups show a strange disconnect between who they voted for and what they actually believe in. National Review's Johah Goldberg points out a few telling trends;

"Something interesting happened on Election Day that didn’t get much attention. Bans on gay marriage were on ballots in several states, and they all won. In fact, gay marriage bans have ultimately passed in all 30 of the states in which they were on the ballot.

The ban in California was particularly intriguing. Proposition 8 would have failed in the Golden State if it were up to white voters, who opposed it by a 51-49 ratio. What carried it over the top was enormous support from black voters, with about 70 percent of them backing it. Hispanics also supported the ban by significant, though smaller, margins. In Florida, where a similar ban required a 60 percent margin, Amendment 2 just barely passed, getting 60 percent of the white vote. The cushion came from blacks, who voted 71 percent in favor, and Latinos, who voted 64 percent in favor.

In other words, Obama had some major un-progressive coattails. The tidal wave of black and Hispanic voters who came out to support Obama voted in enormous numbers against what most white liberals consider to be the foremost civil rights issue of the day.

Put aside the substance of the gay marriage debate; what’s fascinating is how these returns expose the underlying weakness, or at least vulnerability, of progressivism."

The media has been prattling on about how the GOP has to do some ideological soul searching, implying that the defeat of Republicans was somehow a repudiation of conservatism and a vote of approval for the progressives. As the data pours in, it is clear it was not. Speaker Nancy Pelosi learned that the hard way two years ago.

Saturday, November 08, 2008

Sorry if I don't join all of you in a rousing chorus of "Yes We Can". I doubt many people who voted for President Elect Obama cantell me what the hell they think "they're" going to do on a substantive level anyway. I remember a few months ago when Senator Obama was speaking before a jam-packed arena with a chorus of people chanting "Change! Change! Change!" It sounded like someone was being heckled by a thousand pan handlers.

There is nothing "new" about the change Obama peddled throughout the campaign trail. Anyone who's actually devoted their education and lives to the study of American politics will remember hearing this stuff before - from FDR and Woodrow Wilson. The change they brought wasn't pretty, and very few care to remember the goon squads that were at the beck and call of President Wilson, to quash those who weren't buying his brand of "yes we can."

That being said, there is no doubt that what happened on Tuesday night was overwhelming, and I congratulate Senator Obama on his win. What I don't get is the gob-smacking hypocrisy of those who are enraged that many people are still very leery of Obama's past, his associates, what he did on the campaign trail, and what he intends to do for the next four years. I and many others have been called "sore losers", and told that we should "get over ourselves".

Really?

Be honest with yourselves. For the past 8 years, how many of you have relentlessly attacked President Bush? How many of you have called him a liar, a moron, an idiot, and a terrorist? How many you even went so far as to implicate him crazy 9/11 conspiracies? All of you.

Now you're crying foul because not all of us are kneeling before your golden boy, and we don't need to rely on loonies like Michael Moore and Keith Olbermann to tell us what to think. You don't like that I am critical, and will continue to be critical for the next 4 years.

"Give him a chance", you cry. Why? I know the bill of goods he's selling, and I'm not buying it.

I'm going to write one more blog piece on Obama's past, then I'm going to move on to examining the "change" he's talked so much about for the past 16 months. I know the territory, I've been there before. I don't copy and paste my arguments from Wikipedia.

Tuesday, November 04, 2008

It's here. Election day. The Super bowl for geeks, and my geek flag is flying high. I was going to write a longer piece about those mental deficients we call "swing voters" who have been courted and fawned over by the media for over 3 months now, but I'll make it short and sweet. I always wonder why people who are indecisive and stupid get treated like somber intellectuals by the media. As Jonah Goldberg once said;

"If you wait until the last minute to figure out whom to vote for; if you can't tell the differences between the parties and their candidates (and you're not politically exotic — i.e., an anarchist or a libertarian); if you think voting is like a Chinese menu where you can pick a little from here and a little from there; then the odds are you don't know very much about the political system. You may be a brilliant neurosurgeon, but I know interns who are sharper than you about politics."

He makes a striking point. A lot of my friends have said they were big McCain fans, but have changed their minds recently for a laundry list of reasons I cannot even begin to comprehend. These are two candidates with dramatically different world views. If you are suddenly switching sides and going over to the "The One", it means you've had a life changing epiphany - like a life-long Muslim becoming a Catholic. If a Muslim were to become a Christian, it would mean he came to a realization that all the cherished beliefs he held all his life were wrong. A devout Muslim wouldn't convert because he thinks the local parish priest is "cool" and he believes his Mullah just doesn't seem to be "feeling" the Koran lately. Sadly, it seems some believe that it's just that easy. If that's the case, then you just don't get it and have a simpleton's understanding of politics.

Today is the day Americans are going to make a decision that will effect the country in deep and profound ways. The thought of a President Obama horrifies me. Say goodbye to freedom of speech - many journalists have already paid the price for digging too deep into Obama's past. Say goodbye to the separation of church and state - Obama's religious beliefs called "Black Liberationist Theology" calls for church and state to be as one. He has even alluded to this on the campaign trail. Say goodbye to Supreme Court judges who will interpret the Constitution - Obama will pick judges who will steam roll over the Constitution and create new laws on a whim.

I predict and pray for a McCain win tonight, and given the narrow margins in some of the swing states, I think he may just be able to pull it off. You may think Senator Obama would make a great president. You are wrong. This is not American Idol, or an episode of "The West Wing". This is real life, with grown up consequences.

Recently a tape which Obama has been trying to suppress for over 6 months finally emerged showing him re-assuring Columbia University professor Rashid Khalidi that he would be an advocate for the Palestinian cause. Khalidi is a harsh critic of Israel, has made statements supportive of Palestinian terror, and reportedly has worked on behalf of the Palestine Liberation Organization while it was involved in anti-Western terrorism and was labelled by the State Department as a terror group. Obama received $6000 dollars for his work with Khalidi, a man who believes Jews are the decedents of apes and rats. Oh, did I mention Obama was a board member of Professor Khalidi's organization along with Bill Ayers?

Say a prayer today for Senator McCain and Governor Palin. God knows what Wilsonian horrors await if tomorrow we wake up to a President Obama.